AMayhar - The Conjure

by The Conjure (v1. 0) [lit]

  When the deputies came along the dirt road, asking questions, Dooley's Ma didn't know a thing. Of course not. She spent her time working in the garden, boiling washpots of dirty clothes, and chasing after the littlest kids, which kept her so busy she hadn't any time to check on Wim's whereabouts when school was out.

  As long as he brought in stringers of fat perch or meat in the form of raccoon, squirrel, possum, or armadillo, she was content to let him roam. It took that much of the responsibility for feeding the young'uns off her shoulders.

  Since Pa ran off, it had been hard on her, and even at twelve Wim could see that, but he agreed with his mother's hard and fast rule. They didn't take charity, whether from churches, the government, or just plain people. So he didn't waste the time he spent in the woods.

  In fact, he had learned so much just watching Choa that he was making a real impact on the family food situation. Ma hadn't known nearly all the wild stuff you could eat, and now Ma was learning to find it, in addition to the things he brought in from his rambles. It helped a lot.

  One day, Wim thought, he'd just drift off into the swamp and live like Possum Choa, independent as a bull gator on a mudbank. Meanwhile, he listened, eyes wide, when deputies or federal men asked questions. They never thought to ask him any, of course, though he suspected they'd been boys, some time or other, and should know that boys see everything.

  That last fellow, Parker, had been a real son-of-a-bitch, but he looked smart. He hadn't believed Ma, which made Wim see red. He'd snooped around the place, rummaging in the woodshed, checking the ground in the garden as if expecting to find drugs buried there, though it was plain that summer had killed most of the plants, and the ground was baked hard. He never once asked a child anything at all, and even when Wim got in his way all he did was grunt irritably and push him aside. He wasn't near as smart as he looked, that was for damn sure.

  Lethim ask about where Choa lived! Nobody knew but Wim, and now he wouldn't tell that man anything, no matter what. There wasn't another soul could find the cabin in the swamp, and it made the boy chuckle to realize that Parker had thrown away his chance.

  Not that Wim would have led him there, anyway. Possum Choa was a lot better man than Parker, any day of the week.

  Now the boy had time to slip back through the woods, along the big creek, and upstream to the edge of the marsh. As he went, he checked his own set-lines, which were hidden beneath drooping screens of willows growing on any bit of mud-flat along the way. When he saw bobbing motion that he couldn't blame on the wind, he waded into the tangle and found his line, usually with a catfish attached.

  He strung his catch onto pieces of line from his pocket and attached to low-lying snags or the underwater stubs of button willows. Those wouldn't move with the tugging of the captives, tempting others to harvest his catch. He could retrieve them as he came back home. People who robbed other people's set lines gave the boy a pain in the butt.

  Before he reached the swamp, he knew the family would eat well that night. Catfish and turnip greens and armadillo and hickory nuts, plus the garden stuff and cornmeal from their scanty cornfield, formed the basis of their diet, and they all stayed healthy enough on it.

  Miss Ernie, at school, talked a lot of nonsense about nutrition and eating certain things to keep from getting sick, but hell, to get rid of any of the kids in his family he'd have had to kill ‘em with a stick. Theynever got sick!

  As he neared the complex of sloughs, streams, and marshes forming the swamp itself, Wim became very cautious. You never knew, these days, who or what might be poking around down there. His leathery feet, bare in spite of water moccasins and because of lack of shoes that still fitted, found their way along paths he had traced and memorized long before.

  When he came to the sinky-hole, he gave it a wide berth and slipped up the biggest of the creeks beyond it, ducking low to remain behind the willows and cattails fringing the water. Although crows cawed noisily overhead, he had a feeling they weren't talking about him. Somebody else was abroad in the bottomlands.

  Wim crept along, almost holding his breath, until he came to the big eddy that formed the largest alligator hole he knew. When he peered through the screen of brush, there was a log boat bobbing on the water. The gators on the mudbank flanking the hole, which was directly in front of him, were beginning to stir, opening and closing their jaws, hissing, and rising to waddle down to the creek.

  That was Choa's log boat on the water. What on earth was he doing, right there practically in the jaws of the gators? Making a lightning decision, Wim rose to his feet, thrashed the brush with his snake-stick, and squealed like a pig.

  The gator closest to the stream turned to face this new threat, and Wim retreated, still thrashing and grunting. A wild pig would interest them every time, he knew.

  When he came to a huge willow, stout enough to hold his weight, he went up it like a squirrel. Nobody could outrun a gator on land ... not for long, anyway. Here he would be safe until Choa emerged and found him, which he would certainly do.

  Below him, three of the creatures rolled up their eyeballs to see him. Two females, six and eight feet long, were accompanied by a bull that must have measured twelve feet, if an inch.

  Wim grasped the nearest branches even tighter, and his knees gripped the one on which he sat so hard it hurt, though not as bad as those steel jaws and razor teeth would. He clung and sweated, not altogether because of the fall heat.

  He heard a distant splashing and the thud of something dropping into the hollowed log boat. Choa was out of the water with whatever he had been diving for. Wim yelled as loudly as he could. “Possum Choa! Help!"

  The woods went silent. The gators didn't even blink, but in the distance another crow flew, cawing all the way. Then there was the sound of the prow hitting the mudbank and a great hissing and shifting of big bodies as something moved through them toward his perch in the tree.

  The dark face pushed through the willow fronds, ducked under a heavy branch of willow oak, and Choa began to grin. “Young William Dooley, I-be-damned. What you doing up there in that tree, boy?"

  Wim watched in fascinated horror as the old man kicked the big bull gator in the side. It grunted, whirled faster than anyone ignorant of the creatures’ natures would have believed, and stopped.

  Choa was making a strange sound, deep in his throat. It made even Wim's skin goosepimple, and it seemed to affect the alligators even worse. They were turning, trundling back toward the mudbank and hissing.

  "How'd youdo that?” Wim asked, dropping from the tree to land at Choa's feet.

  "My folks was dealing with alligators when yours was back in Ireland fighting Romans,” Choa said.

  "How you know about Romans?” the boy asked, intrigued. He'd heard of them at school, though he figured that any people who'd been gone for thousands of years couldn't be of much good to anybody.

  "I used to read books, back when my family was alive and I worked outside,” the man said. “Learned about a lot more than Romans, but when I decided to quit being civilized, I quit all the way.” He looked Wim up and down. “Now tell me why you're perched up there like a coon hiding from a dog pack."

  "Well, I was sort of moseying through the woods, and I seen your boat. No sign of you, and the gators was beginnin’ to move toward the water. Seemed as if I needed to do somethin’ to keep ‘em off you, so I began making noise to lead them away from the water."

  Once the words were out, Wim began to shiver. What had possessed him to do such a damnfool thing?

  Choa sighed and shook his grizzled head. “I thank you for the thought, but remember, boy, you never have to protect old Choa. Not in this country, you don't. If ever I get in trouble in town, which I don't intend to go to anyway, then you might help me.” He looked at the boy narrow-eyed.

  "What did you see?"

  Wim blinked. “Just the boat. Not even you, though I ‘spect you pulled up something, ‘cause I heard it drop into the boat. Iguessed it might be somethin�
� them drug runners left, maybe."

  Choa nodded thoughtfully. “You guess pretty good, young Wim. So I might as well get some help, which I've needed and haven't had. You want to help me hide that stuff so nobody ever finds it again? I begun to be afraid it would leak and poison the creek, so I knew I had to move it.

  "Besides, I just got word from a couple of ladies in the uplands that one of the runners is back on the river, probably tryin’ to find it. It's time it went where nobody can ever get at it."

  "What about givin’ it to the law?” Wim asked. “That seems to be a good way to get rid of it."

  "If you'd seen as many lawmen down here doing bad things as I have, you wouldn't ask that. They can't be trusted any better than the runners and dealers."

  After thinking a minute, Wim had to admit he was probably right. More than one deputy had brought young women to the boat landing, late at night, and once a body had washed up downstream that looked like a girl he'd seen there with Stew Long.

  They shook down pushers, too, right there at the camping place. He had watched from the woods as a lot of wrong things went on.

  He nodded. “Be glad to help you,” he said. “Where you want to put it?"

  Choa turned and led the boy (Wim felt a bit queasy, but he followed anyway) through the huddle of gators and down to the log boat. In its middle was a muddy lump that seemed to be an aluminum ice chest. Choa gestured for him to climb over it to the other end of the narrow craft; when Wim was in place, Choa stepped into his end and pushed off from the mudbank.

  "I'm gonna put it in the big sinky-hole,” he said.

  Wim felt himself turn pale. He swallowed hard before he said, “No wonder you need help. My God, Choa, you could disappear into that muck and never come up again."

  "That's why I want you on the end of a rope cinched around a good-sized tree. If I slip and go in, I want something to hold onto to pull myself out again and somebody to go for help if the rope breaks."

  That made mighty good sense to Wim. He sat still, watching those alligators watch the boat, as it slid out into the current and moved around the bend between fern-lined banks that seemed to close overhead. At times the creek was so shallow he got out and helped Choa squish through the mud to carry it to the next navigable length.

  When they were unable to go any farther, Choa pulled the boat into a mass of cat-tails and they lifted out the chest, carrying it between them along the maze of passable paths that old Possum Choa seemed able to see without looking, no matter how overgrown and water-covered they might be.

  They came to the big hole just after noon, when the sun was high above the giant water oaks and cypresses that marched out into the morass. It was steamy hot, and the breath of the sinky-hole was sour and stagnant and a bit yeasty.

  Wim found his heart pounding as he helped Choa load the chest onto an impromptu raft cobbled together out of dead branches fallen from the trees above. Choa left him to guard their burden and went off to rummage around among the big scaly-bark hickories growing along a low ridge east of the hole.

  When he returned, he carried a long section of bark some three feet wide, slipped from a dead tree. Wim began to guess how he hoped to get out into the muck without sinking before he got far enough to do much good.

  With considerable shifting and grunting, they positioned the chest on its raft beside Choa's bark slide. Then the old fellow lay flat while Wim tied the raft to a solid section of the bark, freeing Choa's hands to paddle through the water slicking the surface of the sinky hole.

  Around Choa's waist was a thin rope, which was wrapped twice around the biggest water oak. Once the strange outfit moved onto the muck, Wim stepped back and grabbed the end of the rope, while the coils of slack unwound slowly behind Possum Choa.

  Fragments of bark shredded off to float around him, and the raft holding the ice chest began to tilt, bit by bit, as the contraption got out into the middle of the hole. That was some fifty feet across, although its edges were hard to determine, being concealed by the rampant bushes and vines and water-weeds of the low country.

  The last of the slack stretched straight, and Choa fumbled to free the raft. That tilted more and more, until the ice chest settled sideways into the murky mix of water and quicksand. Wim watched, fascinated, as the muddy silver box disappeared with a glubbing sound and a bubble rose, to pop when it reached the surface.

  Now he pulled on the rope, as Choa cautiously turned his slab of bark and headed for the firm ground beneath the tree roots. Beneath him, the bark slide began coming apart, and before he was within reach of safety it sank beneath him.

  Choa grabbed the rope, and Wim pulled desperately, cursing the friction of the oak tree bark, which slowed his intake on the line.

  "Just hold on,” Choa grunted, grabbing the line farther up and beginning to pull himself in, hand over hand. “You doing fine, young Wim. Just don't let this sucker loose!” Dooley shut his eyes and held hard, though his hands, calloused as they were, began to feel skinned. Then he felt a touch at his knee, and Choa was there, covered with slimy mud but grinning his wide white grin.

  "Whoosh!” the boy sighed and sank to sit beside him on the damp leaves beneath the tree.

  "I do saywhoosh myself,” said Choa. “I surely do."

  They grinned at each other as they caught their breath and rested. “You going on home now?” the old man asked. “I got to get on my way, too, because I've got things to do besides mess with this garbage.

  "That man Parmelee's in my swamp, they tell me, and I need to see to him. Nobody's going to get their hands on that junk in the sinky-hole any more, not drug dealers and not deputies who'd sell it back to other dealers."

  Dooley nodded. “I've got some fish tethered along the way home. Better get to ‘em before somebody locates ‘em. There's more thieves in the bottoms now than there used to be, don't you think?"

  Choa grunted and rose. “More everything bad than there used to be. Boy, when it comes to nasty, people can give nasty-lessons to moccasins and gators. The few of us that tries to keep things going down here better stick together. Seems like there's lots of folks wants to make this country as sorry as the towns."

  Wim thought about that as he went home, adding to his stringer of fish along the way. He agreed. His ambition to take Choa's place, when he could, looked better and better all the time.

  CHAPTER XII. Moss and Mud

  It was hot as the toenails of Hell when Oscar Parmelee got to the boat ramp in the woods. This wasn't one of the fancy concrete ones like they had at the state parks but a muddy incline at a low spot in the river bank, and he almost got stuck backing the boat trailer down to the water.

  Parmelee could see a dark green boat, half concealed by a screen of willows; the wide-hatted shape in it seemed to be running trotlines on the slough that angled into the other side of the river. The occasional slap and thump of a catfish dropping into the bottom of the boat was unmistakable.

  Nobody else was in view, though there was a rusty pickup backed into the bushes beside a tattered canvas tent, where a pile of ashes and half-burnt branches marked the site of a campfire. A cracked mirror hung on a nail driven into a hickory tree, and a wash pan sat on a stump. Someone had camped there for quite a while, and Parmelee made a mental note to check out anyone who was there when he returned.

  However, he had work to do. He slid the loaded boat into the water, checking the bindings of his one-man tent as he secured the craft to the scarred sweetgum tree that many others had used for the same purpose. Then he got into his pickup and followed a dim track that disappeared into bushes and big trees at the top of a heavily wooded ridge flanking the river.

  The woods along that ridge were filled with mosquitos and water moccasins in almost equal parts, and it was plain that few ventured there, except in deer and squirrel hunting season. He nosed through overgrown clumps of huckleberry and yaupon until he found the sort of smaller track he was looking for.

  Backing the pickup into that, he locked it
, zipped the key into an inside pocket of his belt, and rearranged the disturbed branches. You'd never know there was a vehicle there, when he was done.

  Once back in the boat, he cast off and dipped his paddle into the water, setting off downstream toward the creek where he had stashed the ice chest. If that thing was there, he was going to find it or die trying. But he had to avoid suspicion, and once he was downriver a bit he began to notice a few people, some fishing with cane poles from the bank, one in a boat checking more trotlines.

  He decided to find a quiet spot and wet a line himself, just to keep up appearances. Around the second bend, he found an eddy deep enough for bass, and there he attached to his line a red and white plug and made an awkward cast into the middle of the wide spot. As he reeled in his line, he happened to glance up.